Big Nate Thurmond a center of attention

SUNDAY PROFILE / Nate Thurmond

Updated 1:22 am, Sunday, March 3, 2013

Nate Thurmond, now the Warriors' celebrity ambassador, attends a game with wife Marci.

Nate Thurmond, now the Warriors' celebrity ambassador, attends a game with wife Marci.

Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle

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Nate Thurmond talks with fans prior to the Warriors game with the Houston Rockets. Thurmond has lived in San Francisco for 50 years since the old San Francisco Warriors drafted him in 1963. Thurmond now serves as an Ambassador to the team and goes to 30 home games a season, with his wife Marci Tuesday, February 12, 2013. less

Nate Thurmond talks with fans prior to the Warriors game with the Houston Rockets. Thurmond has lived in San Francisco for 50 years since the old San Francisco Warriors drafted him in 1963. Thurmond now serves ... more

Photo: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle

Image 3 of 3

Thurmond's greatest skills were blocking shots and rebounding. Here, in 1969, he skies for a rebound against the Celtics. He was the first of four NBA players with a quadruple double.

Thurmond's greatest skills were blocking shots and rebounding. Here, in 1969, he skies for a rebound against the Celtics. He was the first of four NBA players with a quadruple double.

Photo: Jerry Telfer, Chronicle Staff

Big Nate Thurmond a center of attention

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In 1963, a skinny kid from Akron, Ohio, comes to San Francisco for his first job. He's never been West. He knows no one and nothing except the cable car, because he's seen it on the Rice-A-Roni commercial. It's his first day here, and he is sitting on his bed at the Jack Tar Hotel on Van Ness when an earthquake hits. The bed shakes. The mirror sways.

"It welcomed me to the city," recalls the kid, who rode it out and made his way to his new job, as backup center for the San Francisco Warriors professional basketball team. Fifty years later, Nate Thurmond - an NBA Hall of Famer who has been voted one of the top 50 NBA players of all time - is still living in San Francisco and still working for the Warriors. Even after his team broadened its appellation to Golden State and decamped for the Oakland Coliseum Arena, he stayed put in the city, commuting alone over the bridge.

Now if you go to a game, it's common to see two T-shirts in the stands: One reads "San Francisco Warriors," to pitch the team's planned return in 2017; the other replicates a 1960s jersey with a logo that reads, simply, "The City."

At halftime, fans wearing these shirts bolt up the aisle, racing to beat the lines at the concessions. At row seven, though, they come to an abrupt stop because there, in an aisle seat, is the embodiment of the message on their shirts. Thurmond was the first player drafted by the San Francisco Warriors after they came from Philadelphia, and he wore that "The City" muscle shirt like no other player.

At 71, he is moving slow, but when he is on his feet everybody recognizes him. "Let me put it this way," he says, in a voice just north of Barry White, "being 6-11 is a great reminder."

At a game, though, he has a way of sinking into a seat to make him look like a regular fan, and people don't know what to say. So Thurmond starts the conversation for them, if just to keep the egress flowing. His title is Warriors Legend & Ambassador, and he carries it off with diplomatic aplomb.

'A time person'

"Nate is cool and calm. He lets you know he recognizes you when you are speaking to him," says the Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Methodist Church, who arrived in San Francisco the same year as Thurmond. "He's a time person. He takes time. He takes time to make sure his expressions are seen and heard and imprint on the person he is talking to."

Throughout the 1990s and the aughts, the place to get an imprint from Thurmond was at Big Nate's BBQ, on Folsom Street. His timing had been good, opening a barbecue takeout place shortly after Boz Scaggs opened Slim's nightclub around the corner. Between Slim's, the DNA and Paradise lounges, and the 20 Tank Brewery, 11th Street was the premier corridor for nightlife.

Big Nate's was worth it just for the chance to see the Big Man come down the spiral staircase from his office to the front counter and give you a nod of recognition. He was never eager to talk about his own career, but he'd talk about his Memphis pork and his mother's sauce recipe, and he might dissect the Warriors' current foibles for you.

"I'm not the kind of guy who gets tired of people saying, 'Hi, Nate, how are you, blah, blah,' " he says. "They don't have to pat me on the butt by telling me how great I was. I don't need that, but I'm a friendly type of guy."

Eventually, the tumbleweeds started blowing down 11th Street, and 20 years to the week after opening Big Nate's, he sold it. (It has since been renamed CatHead's BBQ.) "I got a little burned out," he says, dropping a pun. "When you have one place, you got to be there, so I got tired of smelling smoke."

Diamond Heights condo

He retreated up toward Twin Peaks to the Diamond Heights condo where he lives with his wife, Marci. He turned 70, then 71, and got the itch again. "I miss the restaurant business and being around people," he says. "That's why I'm considering returning."

He's not ready to talk specifics, but he has partners, and they are looking on lower Fillmore Street, which is becoming restaurant row. You can't say Thurmond is chasing a trend because he has already had one restaurant in the neighborhood, a soul food joint called the Beginning, and he'd moved into the Fillmore district as soon as the ground stopped shaking and he got out of his bed and out of the old Jack Tar, back in '63. He was taken in as a roommate by teammate Wayne Hightower but he didn't stay in very long.

"I was a bachelor, man. You don't come to San Francisco and stay in your house," says Thurmond, who found his way to Bop City, Jack's, and the other late-night jazz and R&B clubs. At first, he had energy left after a game, because he was behind Wilt Chamberlain at center.

"I had never in my basketball life gone back to the bench after 'The Star Spangled Banner,' " he says. "If it had been any other team, I would have thought I was a failure."

Lost to Celtics

But his minutes increased, and by the playoffs the rookie out of Bowling Green State was getting 20 minutes a game alongside Chamberlain, and the Warriors made it to the NBA finals before losing in five games to Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics. Midway through the next season, Chamberlain was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers, the team that replaced the Warriors.

At his farewell party, Chamberlain pulled Thurmond aside to take a walk around the block. "Wilt said, 'Look, they're not trading me because you're a better player than me now,' " Thurmond recalls. " 'They're trading me because I make 75 (thousand) and you make 20 (thousand).' He was high. I was making 14."

In those years, the Warriors didn't draw, with Chamberlain or without. Looking for an audience, the team shuttled between the Cow Palace, the Civic Auditorium, War Memorial Gym at USF, even arenas in Oakland and San Jose.

"Let me put it this way," he says. "I had to look at my schedule more to see where we were going to play than who we were going to play."

Thurmond had come from a stable family. His dad, Andrew, pounded rubber at the Firestone tire factory and his mother, Leala, co-owned a beauty salon, where young Nathaniel swept up the hair after school. His grandmother, Daisy, was his babysitter and cooking instructor. After his first two seasons in San Francisco, he'd dutifully come home to Akron.

"Then that was it," he says. "I said, 'Mom, that bedroom you're saving for me you can rent out, because I'm not coming back.' "

When he returned to training camp for the 1965-66 season, there was a new rookie, Rick Barry from Miami, and everything changed.

There is a clip on YouTube of Thurmond and Barry in action at the NBA All Star Game played at the Cow Palace on Jan. 10, 1967. This was when they played defense and played to win.

On one play, he is double-teamed by Russell and Chamberlain, and scores over both of them as the West pulls off an upset. He was the hardest worker on the court, but Barry got hot and was awarded the MVP trophy, 4 feet tall. That's how it always went.

'Where's the trophy?'

"He didn't split the trophy with me," Nate says, "but he told me I should have been the MVP. I said, 'Rick, I appreciate that. Where's the trophy?' "

There weren't any trophies in fighting for rebounds or shot-blocking, his best skill. "They didn't keep stats on those. I wish that they had," he says. "Soon as they started, I got a quadruple double (at least 10 points, rebounds, blocked shots and assists in a game)." Only four players in NBA history have accomplished that, and he was the first.

Problem was that he did it as a Chicago Bull, in his first game, opening night of the 1974-75 season. After 11 years as a Warrior he'd been traded for a younger center, Clifford Ray. That hurt. Then it hurt again when the Bulls fell to the Warriors in seven games in the Western Conference finals. The Warriors then blew through the Washington Bullets four straight for their only championship, in one of the greatest upsets in NBA history.

'Rick's my man'

"I was pulling for them after they beat us," Thurmond says. "I love Al Attles (then the head coach). Jeff Mullins and I were tight. Rick Barry and I were tight, and still are. Rick's my man."

Thurmond bounced from Chicago to Cleveland, retiring after the 1976-77 season, his 14th. Home in the city for the summer, during this exile, he spotted Marci Kollar while shopping at Dunhill on Union Square.

"I went outside and waited for her to come out," he says, during an interview while she drives them to Oracle Arena. "Don't tell him my line, baby." She doesn't, and they both laugh.

Whatever it was, it worked. Their first date was at the classy old Blue Boar Restaurant. Thurmond picked her up in the Rolls-Royce. "It helped," he says.

Things moved slowly but they were married in 1993, in the chapel at Mission Dolores. He was 51. "I always tease Marci that I had to make sure she was the right one," Thurmond says.

Herb Caen mentioned the wedding in his column, decrying that the city was down one eligible bachelor. It was the first marriage for both of them, and they don't have kids. (Thurmond has a son, Adam, 36, from a prior relationship.)

Charity work

Their condo in Diamond Heights has a view downtown, and during the day Thurmond is involved with his local charities, the Providence Baptist Church Foundation and the Good Tidings Foundation. In honor of his late brother, Ben Thurmond, he also hosts a charity golf tournament in Cleveland, though he never played golf and is not about to start now.

In the evening they roll down the hill to the restaurants, "all over the city, from neighborhood places to downtown," Thurmond says.

When the Chronicle Top 100 Bay Area Restaurants comes out, the Thurmonds will have already been to 65 of them, he estimates, and they'll hit the other 35 before the next year's issue.

On this night it is a window table at Zuni on Market Street. A streetcar clanks by, compelling Thurmond to mention that in 50 years, he has ridden BART once, Muni once and Caltrain once. He's not much for walking, either. When he rises from the table to leave, he walks like his feet have been asleep. But it is the knees.

"I had the right one replaced," he says, "and the left one is jealous." Neither of his eyes is jealous. They are both bad. He has advanced glaucoma and no longer drives.

He sold the Rolls, and now Marci drives to the Warriors games in the Mercedes. It's a slow walk from the players' parking lot. The Ambassador has time for everyone, just like Rev. Williams says.

"Hi, Nate. How you doing?"

"We going to switch tickets tonight, Nate?"

"Miss those ribs, Nate."

When the Thurmonds reach their seats, the first greeting goes out to Wilhelmina Attles, wife of Al. "I've known Nate since he first came into the league, and he was always the same," she says from her seat across the aisle. "He's approachable and you can talk to him."

No dancing now

Thurmond doffs his "old man's cap" and stands for the national anthem. When he sits back down, he stays down until the game is over. This takes some doing, because the job of every player and fan at every pro basketball game these days is to stand up and dance.

Players are expected to show their moves at introductions, and at every timeout the dance cam is going round and round. If you haven't had lessons in Gangnam Style, don't go to a game. The camera will find you and get you up onto the video board for a sellout crowd of 19,000 to mock.

"Times have changed, but that's a bit much for me," says Thurmond, who played in the day when fan participation consisted of blowing smoke rings into the Cow Palace drapes. "Between the music and the video, you think you're at the circus."

He still has the driest, coolest delivery, and when he starts a phrase with "Let me put it this way," you know you are getting the final word on the topic. So here is the final word on the team's upcoming reverse migration.

"Oh, man, I can't wait. Nothing against Oakland, but I live in San Francisco, and it is 'The City,' bottom line. Nobody calls Oakland 'The City.' "